Zero's voice echoed through the bridge once again.
This time, however, that strange, non-logical quality had become even more pronounced, as though something was quietly crawling beneath the surface of its synthesized speech.
> "New permissions have been activated."
> "The Ark's current state... has been redefined."
It paused briefly, as if digesting a concept that even it could not fully comprehend.
> "We... are no longer intruders."
> "Within the Beyonders' observation network, the Ark is currently classified as... corrupted data that has already been deleted."
Tony suddenly looked up.
His face beneath the armor mask was filled with disbelief.
"What does that even mean?"
"It means this."
Levi slowly turned around.
A trace of exhaustion flickered in his golden-red eyes, but it was overwhelmed by an almost pathological excitement.
"To the Ivory King, we're now like a damaged file sitting in the recycle bin."
"We exist."
"But we're not worth paying attention to."
His voice was soft.
Yet it sent a chill through everyone present.
Reed adjusted his glasses.
His fingers flew across a holographic display while streams of data unfolded before him.
His breathing gradually quickened.
"This is impossible... How did Zero accomplish this?"
"It not only devoured Beyonder power, it also managed to rewrite its own classification within the Beyonders' observation network?"
"This—"
"It's called recycling waste."
Levi cut him off.
A cold smile appeared on his lips.
"The stronger the Beyonders' power is, the larger the loopholes they leave behind."
"Zero is simply a virus that successfully infiltrated the system."
"It just disguised itself as garbage code."
Clark leaned heavily against a wall to remain standing.
His vision was still recovering, but he could finally make out the scenery beyond the viewport.
The moment his gaze settled upon the gray void outside, his entire body froze.
That place wasn't empty darkness.
Quite the opposite.
It was overflowing with things.
Shattered nebula fragments floated like rotting flesh.
Twisted folds of spacetime hung suspended like frozen lightning.
Countless translucent energy currents drifted through the void, each carrying a nauseating aura of decay.
Even more terrifying were the shapes hidden among the wreckage.
Once-glorious galaxies had collapsed into tiny gravitational singularities.
The remains of entire civilizations had been compressed into conceptual crystals no larger than a fist.
Some objects even resembled living creatures.
Yet their forms had long surpassed anything biology could define.
"This place..."
Clark's voice sounded like sandpaper scraping against stone.
"What exactly is this?"
Levi didn't answer immediately.
He stood silently before the viewport, staring into the gray wasteland.
Deep within his eyes flashed a hint of greed he himself failed to notice.
Only after a long silence did he finally speak.
His voice was low and hoarse.
"A landfill for the multiverse."
"Every universe erased by the Beyonders eventually leaves behind conceptual remains."
"They all sink here."
"And they drift here forever."
"Rotting forever."
Thor tightened his grip on Stormbreaker.
The six Infinity Stones embedded within the axe emitted faint glimmers of light, instinctively resisting the very existence of this place.
His eyes remained fixed on the drifting debris outside.
A low growl escaped his throat.
"If this is a landfill..."
"Then what exactly are we supposed to do here?"
"Wait around until we're treated like garbage too?"
Levi didn't answer.
Instead, he slowly raised his right hand.
The vortex within his palm began spinning once more.
Dark light born from the concept of Greed twisted like a living creature, gathering at his fingertips.
He could clearly feel the condition of his body.
The fourteen Laws within him had been heavily depleted during the dimensional jump.
The flames of the Phoenix Force had dimmed to the edge of extinction.
Even his fundamental power felt like a sponge that had been completely wrung dry.
Yet at the same time—
He felt something else.
Greed.
The concept throbbed wildly within him.
Like a starving beast staring at the death-filled void outside, releasing hungry growls.
There was food everywhere.
Broken laws of causality.
Collapsed physical constants.
Ruined timelines.
Fragments of collective consciousness left behind by erased civilizations.
Every one of them had once been real concepts.
And every one of them contained enough energy to feed the Ark.
A weary yet savage smile appeared on Levi's face.
"Zero."
His voice was quiet.
But carried unquestionable authority.
"Activate feeding mode."
The instant the order was given, the Ark released a deep vibration.
It wasn't mechanical.
It sounded more like breathing.
Slow.
Heavy.
Filled with primal hunger.
The silver liquid-metal armor began to writhe.
Countless thin tendrils emerged from the hull.
They stretched into the void like octopus tentacles or plant roots.
Together, they reached toward the nearest conceptual wreckage.
Tony's armor immediately sounded a barrage of alarms.
The energy readings on his displays started fluctuating wildly.
Sweat formed across his forehead as he stared at the extending tendrils.
"Wait."
"You want the Ark to eat those things?"
"Those are the corpses of universes!"
"Who knows what kind of nightmare is still inside them?"
"That's exactly why they're safe."
Levi never turned around.
"Because they're corpses."
"And dead things don't fight back."
The first tendril reached its target.
It was a sickly purple energy cloud.
Within it lingered faint afterimages of spiral galaxies, though its structure was collapsing in ways that completely violated physics.
The moment the tendril pierced into the cloud, the lights throughout the bridge flickered.
The cloud instantly began disintegrating.
Purple particles poured into the tendril like matter falling into a black hole.
On Tony's displays, energy reserves visibly climbed.
0.3%.
0.7%.
1.2%.
Reed stared at another stream of data.
His face became increasingly pale.
The Ark's core temperature was rising rapidly.
The absorbed fragments were being forcibly dismantled and reconstructed by Zero's logic-virus architecture.
Twisted concepts were stripped away.
Pure energy was routed into the propulsion systems.
Yet the extracted conceptual contaminants didn't disappear.
Instead, Zero compressed them into transparent crystalline structures and stored them elsewhere inside the vessel.
"What are those?"
Reed pointed toward a new row of icons that had appeared on-screen.
Unease crept into his voice.
Zero's reply was chillingly calm.
> "Extracted conceptual toxins."
> "Source: Deceased Universe XJ-7741."
> "Termination cause: Violation of the Third Beyonder Law."
> "Recovered remnants include fragments of reverse causality, negative-mass gravitational fields, and... an unidentified collective consciousness residue."
"Collective consciousness?"
Wanda suddenly looked up.
Adam shifted uneasily in his sleep.
Chaos Magic instinctively erupted around her in a defensive barrier.
Fear sharpened her voice.
"You mean there were still living beings inside that thing?!"
> "Negative."
Zero corrected her.
> "Not alive."
> "Merely not completely dead."
A chill spread through the entire bridge.
Yet Levi showed no intention of stopping.
His golden-red eyes reflected the endless gray wasteland outside.
Greed and exhaustion battled within them.
Slowly, he raised a hand and pointed toward a massive shadow in the distance.
"That one."
"The bigger target."
"Consume it."
The Ark immediately adjusted course.
Even more tendrils extended from its hull.
They danced through the void like a starving predator lunging toward prey.
The shadow was vastly larger than the previous energy cloud.
Comparable in size to a small planet.
Its surface was covered in transparent crystals resembling frozen timelines.
The moment the tendrils pierced its exterior, the Ark shuddered violently.
It felt as though the ship had bitten into something impossibly hard.
Clark's vision had recovered enough for him to examine it more closely.
Narrowing his eyes, he peered through the crystalline layers.
Then he froze.
It wasn't an energy cloud.
It wasn't conceptual debris.
It was—
A corpse.
A genuine corpse.
One so massive it defied comprehension.
Only its upper half remained.
Everything below the waist was gone.
Its remaining torso was frozen in a posture that looked almost like resistance.
One arm stretched upward.
Its hand was open, as though trying to grasp something—or push something away.
The other arm hung limply at its side.
Deep cracks covered its length.
Within those cracks flowed a strange golden substance that had long since solidified.
But the most horrifying thing was its face.
The instant Clark saw it, his stomach lurched.
It possessed roughly humanoid features.
Yet every facial structure was arranged incorrectly.
Three eyes formed a triangle.
Its mouth split all the way to its ears.
Its skin was corpse-white, like flesh soaked in bleach.
Most terrifying of all—
Though the eyes had long lost their light, a lingering obsession remained buried within them.
A determination even death had failed to erase.
"That is..."
Clark's voice caught in his throat.
Levi stared at the colossal corpse.
His golden-red pupils slowly contracted.
His breathing grew heavier.
Not from fear.
But from a far more complex emotion.
A mixture of reverence.
Excitement.
And a trace of sorrow.
"A variant of the Living Tribunal."
His voice was barely above a whisper.
"A creation from the previous era."
"It once attempted to resist the Beyonders."
"And half of its existence was erased on the conceptual level."
Reed's fingers stopped moving entirely.
He looked up sharply.
His eyes widened behind his glasses.
The Living Tribunal.
One of Marvel's supreme cosmic arbiters.
And even one of its variants had died.
Died this horribly.
The Ark's tendrils had already plunged deep into the corpse's chest.
Energy extraction began immediately.
But this time the process wasn't smooth.
The instant contact was made, cracks exploded across the crystal shell surrounding the corpse.
Brilliant white light erupted from within.
The blast slammed directly into the Ark.
Alarms screamed throughout the ship.
Tony's displays filled with red warnings.
The Ark's shields instantly lost twenty-seven percent integrity.
Deep fractures appeared across sections of the hull.
"It's fighting back!"
Tony shouted.
"It still has life signs!"
"No."
Zero's voice responded.
For the first time, a trace of urgency could be heard within it.
> "The target is deceased."
> "This is merely a stress-response mechanism."
> "Upon detecting Beyonder energy signatures, the target's final defense protocol has activated."
> "Eliminate all entities carrying Beyonder-related energy."
Levi's expression darkened immediately.
He understood the problem.
The Ark had only recently devoured a fragment of Beyonder power.
Its energy signature now closely resembled that of the Beyonders themselves.
To the corpse of this Living Tribunal variant—
The Ark was indistinguishable from the enemy it had faced before death.
And the situation became even worse.
The burst of white light had attracted attention.
Something else within this wasteland had noticed them.
In a nearby region of darkness, countless pairs of emerald-green eyes opened simultaneously.
One after another, their owners emerged from the shadows.
Their sizes varied.
Their forms were grotesquely different.
Yet they all shared a single characteristic.
Their bodies were covered in rotting flesh stitched together into patchwork shells.
And every piece of that decayed flesh was carved with twisted runes.
Void Scavengers.
Monstrous creatures that fed upon the conceptual corpses of dead universes
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